Mark Ogden is the Telegraph's Northern Football Correspondent.

Manchester City now ready to leave the kamikaze spending to others

Sir Alex Ferguson will have to shift his focus away from Manchester City if he chooses to repeat his accusation of ‘kamikaze spending’ when he offers his thoughts on the transfer window’s ‘Manic Monday.’

Manic Monday, Monday Madness, Meltdown Monday. Call it what you will, but if it was a Blue Monday, that was purely down to Chelsea’s £72m splurge on Fernando Torres and David Luiz in the final hours of the January transfer window.

As for City, the apparent Evil Empire of the transfer market, deadline day passed with nothing more than a brief link with Birmingham’s transfer-seeking winger Sebastian Larsson.

There was no eleventh hour raid on Real Madrid or a grotesquely over-inflated offer to Liverpool in a bid to scupper Chelsea’s bid for Torres.

Eastlands was all quiet while the madness intensified elsewhere, but that’s because City have now turned a corner and are beginning to reap the benefits of the long-term strategy imposed by chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak and chief executive Garry Cook.

Clearly, City have not suddenly retreated from the market. Their £27m capture of Edin Dzeko from Wolfsburg proves that they remain capable of spending with the best of them.

But the Dzeko deal was done in the first week of the window after months of planning rather than an act of panic in the dying hours of the window.

City walked away from the deal last summer when Wolfsburg demanded £50m, but they pursued their interest and, for all of the accusations that City will throw money at the market to get what they want, negotiated the German club down to a fee that they believed was more appropriate.

And with the dust settling on Chelsea’s move for Torres and Liverpool’s £35m purchase of Andy Carroll, £27m for Dzeko suddenly looks to be a very good piece of business.

But the smartest element of City’s dealings this January has not been their capture of Dzeko.

The biggest success has been somehow managing to get the likes of Emmanuel Adebayor, Wayne Bridge and Roque Santa Cruz off the wage bill.

Had they been able to find a taker for the fading force that is Shaun Wright-Phillips, it would have been the perfect window for manager Roberto Mancini.

But with Real Madrid, West Ham and Blackburn now paying the salaries of Adebayor, Bridge and Santa Cruz respectively, City have saved themselves almost £7m over the next six months.

That figure is not even loose change to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, but the fact that City are even attempting to cut waste is significant and a pointer towards their determination to work within Uefa’s Financial Fair Play regulations.

The panic buys are a thing of the past at Eastlands. The likes of David Silva, James Milner and Yaya Toure have all been successes since arriving last summer, while Mario Balotelli, Aleksandar Kolarov and Jerome Boateng offer promise for the future, which is why Mancini had no need to spend huge sums again this month.

City have undoubtedly changed the game and the major negative of Sheikh Mansour’s two-year reign at Eastlands has been the re-inflation of the transfer market to the kamikaze levels referred to by Ferguson last August.

But while City will spend big again this summer if they qualify for the Champions League, there now appears to be sound strategy in place.

Maybe their spending has sparked the kamikaze spending of others, but for this window at least, Manchester City cannot be accused of leading the madness.